Lord & Lady release The Lift

Picking the right time to release a record can be a challenging process even for the most experienced of artists. Winter albums are designed to warm us up during the coldest of months, summer albums are usually meant to get us excited about being out having fun in the sun. All of them are set up to fulfil the sonic needs of us, the consumers, but moreover they can artistically capture the mood and feel of an entire section of the calendar, too. Lord & Lady have chosen this June to release their EP No Ghost, and anyone familiar with the aspiring dream pop duo will agree that it’s the absolute perfect time for the world to get acquainted with their stunningly romantic and emotionally poignant style.

Lord & Lady remind me a lot of The Vaselines. The Vaselines were an instrumental force in the development of alternative rock in the 1980s, and arguably the most melodic noise rock band that ever pressed vinyl. Coming screeching out of Glasgow, Scotland in 1986, Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee developed a signature duality in their sound that was equally feminine and masculine, and it made for sheer pop magic. If you strip out their noisier, more atonal parts in their sound, you would essentially get what Lord & Lady is recording today, albeit a much more evolved, 21st century format. There’s space for their style to grow a little more into the big speakers they’re trying to fill, but their new single “The Lift” off of No Ghost is really too inviting to really be picky over. Unlike The Vaselines, Lord & Lady have a distinctly more pop-focused drive that allows for their sound to be significantly more accessible and radio friendly then their punk rock forerunners, and it may end up doing the genre well to see this kind of friendliness with melody rising back up to the surface of the scene.

In many ways, “The Lift” and the extended play that it’s prepping us for are stylized like a soundtrack to the epic picture that is the twilight of 2010’s pop music. It’s like we’re listening to all of the sounds that have materialized in the last ten years tucked tightly under a blanket and made to simmer and create a spacy backdrop that Lord & Lady use as a template to weave their ascending psychedelic verse and gentle vocal exchanges. Having come together in the most classic of California circumstances and now creating something that we can almost universally agree is fresh and appealing to music intellectuals, the end is nowhere in sight for this dynamically attractive unit. I can see their cult following finally bursting at the seams after No Ghost drops next month, and it will only be a matter of time before we begin seeing plenty of sound-alikes coming out of the woodwork to try and replicate the shimmering resonances of “The Lift.” I for one won’t forget who the originals were, and it should be mesmeric to witness how they decide to set themselves apart further from the crowd.